The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  Chapter 31

  Anna felt more like herself when she came down for dinner at noon. More composed. She had tamed her hair under its small black lace pinner and wore the black paduasoy gown and petticoat that had been given to her by the vice admiral’s late wife. “It no longer fits me as well as it did,” Mrs. Gordon had told her while running her hand down the black corded silk, “but the paduasoy is from Spain and will last a good while yet. A black gown can be of a great many uses.”

  Her words had been sadly prophetic, for not three months later the vice admiral’s wife had been dead of her illness and Anna had worn the black paduasoy gown while standing with Jane at the funeral. She’d worn it while mourning, and worn it for Jane’s funeral, too, but the gown, far from carrying sadness, instead gave her comfort, as if she’d been given not only the gown but the kindness and grace of the woman who’d worn it.

  And now, as she entered the dining room, she tried to show that same grace as she greeted the Lacys. The general escorted her round to her chair at the table, then saw his wife seated and took his own chair at the opposite end. Mrs. Lacy looked paler than she had the night before. Anna had seen women suffer the first months of being with child, and she knew that the suffering lasted sometimes till the child had quickened. She hoped it would not be that way for the general’s wife.

  As if aware of her thoughts, Mrs. Lacy smiled. “I have endured this a great many times, Mistress Jamieson. ’Tis but a small price to pay for so rich a reward,” she remarked in her beautifully accented English. “I gather you did meet my children, earlier this morning?”

  “Yes, I did. They were most charming.”

  “And most secretive,” she said, “about the details of your meeting, but I see you have emerged unscathed.”

  The general asked, “You met them all at once? Brave girl.”

  “She seems to have impressed them,” Mrs. Lacy told her husband. “Katie asked if we could keep her.”

  “Well, then.” General Lacy, in amusement, said, “Perhaps we shall.”

  There were two other places set at the table—one across from Anna, and one to her left, to show that more guests were expected. One arrived a minute later.

  “Father Dominic,” the general introduced the middle-aged Franciscan friar, whose brown robe and tonsured head evoked a stir of memories. The Franciscans were not Capuchins, though Capuchins did count themselves as members of that order, having splintered from the main Franciscan body some two centuries ago. There had been Capuchins here in St. Petersburg till lately, and the sight of their long hoods and beards had always raised the thought of Father Graeme in her mind, but there’d been quarrels between them and the Franciscans, and the tsar had, in an edict that had been one of his last, ordered the Capuchins to leave, just this past January.

  That left only the Franciscans now to serve the small community of Catholics in St. Petersburg, some preaching at the Catholic Church in Greek Street and the chapel for the French on Vasilievsky Island, while others could be found, like Father Dominic, with private families, serving there as tutors for the children, and as chaplains.

  Father Dominic, like all his order, was clean-shaven, and his eyes, though not unkind, held none of Father Graeme’s humor.

  When they’d waited some few minutes longer for the final guest, the general gave the nod of one accustomed to decision making. “Father, will you say the blessing, please?”

  “Of course.”

  The blessing was a lengthy one, but Anna kept her head discreetly bent, as did the others. When the floorboards creaked behind her she thought little of it, until a man’s leg came suddenly into the edge of her vision—a strong-looking leg clad in black woolen breeches, a black stocking rolled up and over the knee band, the fall of a black coat pushed out of the way as the man slid with stealth onto the chair beside her own.

  Not wanting to put a foot wrong on her first day, she kept her gaze downcast until Father Dominic said his “Amen.” Only then did she give rein to her curiosity, glancing sideways and up at the newcomer, who with his own head respectfully bent was just finishing crossing himself.

  His head lifted. His eyes briefly angled to hers, and he winked before looking away as the general’s wife brightly said,

  “Edmund, I thought you had forgotten us.”

  The general smiled. “No kin of mine,” he told his wife, “would think to miss his dinner.”

  “No indeed.” The man at Anna’s side spoke easily, without a hint of deference in his tone. “And never during Lent. If you’ll forgive me, Father.”

  Father Dominic asked lightly, “Have you been committing some new sin?”

  “I have not, as it happens. I’ve been caring for a bird, and surely even your St. Francis would approve of that? He preached to the birds, did he not?”

  Mrs. Lacy replied, “Yes, he certainly did. Mistress Jamieson, may I present Mr. Edmund O’Connor, my husband’s relation, who lately has journeyed from Spain.”

  Anna somehow remembered her manners, and nodded her head and said, “Mr. O’Connor.”

  His dark eyes were not disrespectful, exactly, but neither were they like the eyes of a gentleman. More like the eyes of a rogue. “Mistress Jamieson,” he said. “Your servant.” The stress on that final word, meant just for her ears, was clearly intentional.

  Not paying heed to the charge in the air, Mrs. Lacy asked, “What sort of bird was it, Edmund?”

  Anna thought he paused before replying, and she wondered whether that was because Mrs. Lacy, being from Livonia, might share the superstitions of the Russians when it came to hooded crows.

  The pause was not a long one. Smoothly he replied, “An injured one. It took a while to find a place to keep it, where it would be safe.”

  “And what,” Mrs. Lacy went on, “did you use for a cage?”

  “The same cage that we used for the rabbits.”

  The general reminded him, “We ate the rabbits.”

  “Aye, that’s why I’ve hidden the bird,” came the dry answer.

  Wine was poured. Father Dominic, keeping to water and bread for his Lenten meals, would not take any, but Anna was glad of it, passing her cup out of habit across the small glass bowl of water set out at her side before taking her first sip, a gesture that did not escape General Lacy’s keen eye.

  “Mistress Jamieson, I see you drink to the health of the king who lives over the water,” he said.

  Anna lowered her cup. “General, I drink the health of the only true king.”

  “Ah.” The general looked down the long table as he passed his own wine cup over his water bowl. “One more for our side,” he said to his wife.

  Beside Anna, the dark eyes of Edmund O’Connor held innocent as he remarked, “Aye, if ever the king is in need of a bird catcher, your Mistress Jamieson here will do well for him.”

  Anna, refusing to let him embarrass her, answered him calmly, “At least I did catch the bird.”

  “And I’d have caught it as well, had I used your technique, but I thought that removing my shirt, and in front of the children, might just be improper.”

  She colored a little beneath the raised eyebrows, although she perceived that the eyebrows were raised as much by the plain fact they were arguing as by the argument’s content.

  The general’s wife, trying to hide her astonishment, looked at her husband. “Well.”

  “Quite.” Exchanging a glance with her, he settled back like a spectator at an amusement, and said, “Shall we have some more wine?”

  ***

  “He delights in provoking me,” Anna complained three days later when Mary, the vice admiral’s daughter, stopped in for an afternoon visit. Stabbing the seam of the sleeve she was piecing together with needle and thread, Anna said, “I can hardly request to sit elsewhere at dinner, for then he would triumph. And sitting across from him would prove no better than sitting beside him, and might be still worse, for I’d then have to look at him.”

  Mary said, “I know of some who
would claim ’tis no hardship to look at him.”

  Anna’s eyes rolled. “He himself would be first to claim that, I’ve no doubt.”

  “He’s certainly more handsome than your Mr. Taylor.”

  “Mr. Taylor is not mine,” said Anna, with great patience, as she drew the needle through the lovely gray-green silk. “And I should imagine whatever good looks God gave Mr. O’Connor were merely to compensate for what he lacks in his nature.”

  They were sitting in the small blue chamber next to Mrs. Lacy’s, with the shutters of its windows fully open to the light. The door stood open, too, and Mary looked at it with meaning, before Anna said, “There’s no one who can hear me. Mrs. Lacy is asleep now, and the boys are at their lessons, and the girls are with their dancing master.”

  “Not the same one who instructed us, I hope?”

  “No. This one comes from Holstein.”

  “Not the Terror from Vienna, then. It is a wonder that we learned to dance at all,” said Mary, with a shudder of remembrance. Picking up the dropped thread of their conversation, she asked, “What of Mr. O’Connor, then? Is he not at home?”

  “He does not live here,” Anna said. “He lives in lodgings, near Sir Harry’s house.”

  “Ah. That would then explain it.”

  “Explain what?”

  “Why he is suddenly become a favorite subject of the gossip of the merchants’ wives. They must observe him every day, if he does live so close to them.”

  The next stitch wanted care, and Anna bent her head to concentrate. “And what is it they say?”

  “Well,” Mary, always loving gossip, told her, “I did hear it rumored he had little choice in leaving Spain; his friends there cast him out.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Some say he used a woman ill, and left her sadly ruined.”

  “Oh? And what do others say?”

  “That he did kill a man.”

  She had no time for rumors. “With his sword, or with his tongue?” she quipped. “They are both sharp enough.”

  That drew a smile from Mary. “I confess I do not know. I’ll ask them.”

  “No, I pray you, do not bother. You should keep clear of the merchants’ wives, at any rate,” was Anna’s firm advice. “I wish that any man who views us as the gentler sex could spend an hour with Mrs. Hewitt and her friends. He’d soon reform his views.”

  “If he survived,” said Mary, with a laugh. “But I cannot, in all good conscience, speak ill of the merchants’ wives, when I may one day join their number.”

  Anna glanced up. “Why? What merchant now has caught your eye?”

  Mary had already furrowed her brow into one of her small but becoming frowns, and now deflected the question by musing, “So then Mr. O’Connor has lodgings of his own, and yet he dines here every day? I wonder why?”

  “I should have said from laziness, except I now believe it is the sport of baiting me that he enjoys.” She pricked her finger with an overzealous stitch, and rested both hands for a moment, asking Mary, “Am I truly so amusing to annoy?”

  “Well,” Mary said, “in perfect honesty, you do rise rather well to any argument.”

  “’Tis hardly the accomplishment I wished to show the general and his wife.”

  “They must not mind,” was Mary’s reasoning. “They’ve kept you this entire week without the least complaint. And General Lacy told Papa two days ago how very taken with you Mrs. Lacy was, and that you’d been—and I do quote his words exactly, now—a welcome light around the house.”

  She felt a wash of pride. “Then,” she told Mary, “I shall bite my tongue more firmly, and endure Mr. O’Connor.”

  “Put him in his place, more like. You are still ranked above him, after all.”

  With a shrug, Anna bent her head over her work again, saying, “I’ve no rank at all. I am Anna Niktovna, and if I tried putting on airs there are those who would swiftly remind me of that. But,” she said, “if I have no rank and he has no manners, then we are evenly matched.”

  Chapter 32

  She had his queen.

  The chessboard lay between them like a battlefield, its armies stripped and decimated, some reduced to standing at the edge and watching helplessly. She’d played the black men, as she always did. Edmund O’Connor, when they had cast lots and determined that white would move first, had advised her in his condescending way to choose again, but having spent these several years defending her own black-haired king she would not be persuaded now to change. And now her king stood proud behind the safety of his castle, with a bishop and a knight to guard him well.

  Edmund O’Connor frowned, and leaning forward rested both his elbows on the table’s edge as he surveyed the board. He’d shed his coat when she had captured his last knight, and sat now in his plain black woolen waistcoat and his shirtsleeves, with the cuffs rolled up his forearms in the manner of a working man.

  The general, who had pulled his own chair round and brought it close to better watch the game, smiled faintly but said nothing. There were only the three of them left in the drawing room, now. Father Dominic commonly took to his bed early, and Mrs. Lacy had gone up herself not long afterward, and now the candles had burned an inch lower in all of the great round brass sconces that hung on the walls of the room, like gold mirrors reflecting the warmth of the light.

  That same light caught the angle of Edmund O’Connor’s black eyelashes and slanted shadows across the hard line of his cheek as he looked for an opening… looked for it…

  There, Anna thought. He had seen it.

  He lifted the one pawn he hadn’t yet moved from its starting position and set it with confidence two spaces forward, so that it came level with her own black pawn on the next square.

  She smiled. Her own pawn slid forward and on the diagonal, taking the empty square his pawn had crossed as she captured his piece with a satisfied hand.

  He objected. “Now, see, you can’t do that. My pawn can go two spaces on its first move, so it didn’t set foot on that square.”

  “I assure you it did, sir. It may not have stopped on that square, but the rules do assume that it crossed it, and so my own pawn is permitted to capture it as it goes by. It is called,” she said, “capturing en passant, and is a fair move.”

  “Is it, now?” He sat back, and his dark gaze fell somewhere between irritation and grudging respect. “And you’d know about fair, would you?”

  Smiling more broadly, the general said, “She drew you in, my boy. She knew you’d want your queen back, so she cleared you a path and you took it. Mind you, ’twas a greater mistake when you gave her your queen to begin with.”

  “She only got my queen because I thought she meant to take my knight.”

  “She did that very neatly, I did notice. It can be a useful military tactic in the field, to misdirect the enemy.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It is,” the general said. “We did the same thing at Poltava.”

  The younger man gave a mock groan. “Oh, it’s never Poltava again, is it?”

  “It was a great battle. One of my greatest, in fact. I was wounded. That gives me the right to repeat the tale daily, should I have a mind to.” His voice and his eyes were both rich with the sly humor Anna was growing accustomed to. “I do feel sure Mistress Jamieson, with her fine martial mind, would not find my tale dull.”

  “Mistress Jamieson,” Edmund O’Connor remarked, “could most likely relate it herself, if she’s lived here in Russia since she was a child. I myself have been here but a handful of months, and already I know more than any man needs to about that one battle.”

  That battle, as Anna knew well, had been Russia’s own Battle of Bannockburn—a turning point many believed would long echo in history, the better to savor because the invading Swedes had been defeated on Russia’s own soil.

  Anna told the general, “I was but a babe in Scotland then. And I have never heard the story but from men who simply did as they were ordered, not
from anyone who had a larger part in it. Pray, tell me all you like about Poltava.”

  Smiling, he decided, “Well, perhaps not all. But how you captured Edmund’s queen was not unlike the way we got our men across the Vorskla. Here, I’ll show you.” Reaching forward, General Lacy started rearranging pieces on the chessboard, over Edmund’s dry objection.

  “We were not yet done with that.”

  “Of course you were. Surrender was your only option, lad, there is no honor in denying it. I’m saving you embarrassment.” He made a neat square of the rooks, directly in the center of the board. “We’ll say this is the village of Poltava, under siege,” he said, and set the white king with a small force just below it. “Charles, the Swedish king, was here, encamped with all his troops. Our armies had assembled on the far shore of the Vorskla River, opposite the Swedes.” A tight line of black chessmen gathered down the board’s one edge. “We had to get across, but they outnumbered us, and in the water all our men and horses would be vulnerable. So what to do?” He looked from Anna’s face to Edmund’s, waiting for an answer.

  Edmund said, “You cross at night, and choose a place where they won’t see you.”

  “But they knew we had to cross, and so they always watched us. They were waiting for it. We could not surprise them.”

  He had looked again to Anna, and she tried, but in the end confessed, “I know you said this has to do with how I took the queen, but I cannot connect the two events.”

  “I’ll help you, then. If you did seek to capture Edmund’s queen,” the general asked, “why did you send your bishop to the far side of the board?”

  “Because I wanted his attention to be there, and not upon his queen.”

  “Precisely.”

  She began to see his purpose. “Did you draw the Swedish sentries off, then, with a ruse?”

  “We did exactly that. We feigned a crossing of the river here, downstream, below the village, and that brought the Swedes out in response, as we had hoped it would, to fire at us and hold us back. Or so they thought. Because while they were shooting at a small part of our forces here,” he said, “the whole remainder of our army secretly swung north, and crossed the Vorskla all unnoticed.” As he moved the black chess pieces in an illustration of the tactic, something else occurred to him. “And furthermore, the King of Sweden, who was also fooled by our false crossing and had ridden south himself to hold us back, was shot so badly in his foot that day he could not lead his troops upon the final field of battle.” With a movement of his hand, he toppled Edmund’s white king. “There are many who will say he lost Poltava, and the Northern War, because of it.”